The field of the invention is scheduling systems and methods and more specifically scheduling systems that provide queues regarding how to optimally schedule appointments given current schedule status.
Historically, medical facilities scheduled appointments with clients by filling the next available schedule time slot if the slot fit into the client's schedule. Thus, if a client called to schedule a routine appointment for a physical and the next available slot occurred on a Friday two weeks after the date on which the client called to schedule the appointment, irrespective of how full the Friday schedule was, the appointment would be scheduled.
While scheduling appointments during next available time slots seems to make sense from the perspective of compressing physician schedules and increasing facility profitability, such scheduling practices also have some adverse consequences. First, in many cases unscheduled appointments have to be accommodated on an emergency or other basis. For instance, assume that a family health physician provides services to a family with an infant and that the infant wakes up one morning with a rash. In this case, the physician may simply instruct the parents over the phone to take some corrective action. If the rash persists, the parents may want to visit the physician during the physician's normally scheduled day and as quickly as possible.
Here, if the physician's schedule is completely booked for the next three weeks, one way to schedule an appointment for the infant in the near future is to squeeze the appointment in between already scheduled appointments on one of the fully scheduled days. Squeezing appointments in between existing appointments during a fully scheduled day is not a great option as the appointment with the infant and the other appointments end up being shorter than the time typically allotted or the appointments that occur after the infant's appointment end up being pushed back on the schedule. Where appointments are shortened or pushed back, clients are inconvenienced, understandably disappointed and, in some cases, receive or at least perceive reception of poorer services.
Another way to schedule an appointment for the infant is to extend the physician's day to add an appointment time slot either at the beginning or at the end of the day. Unfortunately many physicians already have demanding schedules and do not usually like to extend their office hours. In addition, medical offices often have regular hours during which staff is present and extending appointments beyond the usual office hours is administratively difficult.
Second, even where medical needs are not urgent, at least some clients like to schedule medical appointments as soon as they can after recognizing the need for consultation. Thus, for instance, where a client decides to have a routine physical performed, the client may want to have the physical performed in the next two days. As another instance, if a client wakes up one morning with pain in his thigh, while the pain may not amount to an emergency condition, the client may be anxious to identify the cause of the pain. Here, also, if the patient were forced to schedule an appointment two weeks after the pain in initially experienced, the pain may no longer be present and the cause likely would not be determinable. In either of these two cases, the same two options, squeezing in an additional appointment or extending the working day, are available to accommodate the client and the same problems result.
To accommodate emergency type appointments as well as demanding clients, many facilities have adopted scheduling policies whereby at least some schedule times are purposefully left open in each working day at least until a time temporally proximate the working day. Here, when a client calls to schedule an appointment, if the appointment is not urgent and the client is willing to attend an appointment in a few weeks, the scheduler may schedule the appointment in a few weeks even if there are open schedule time slots during the next few days. To this end, in known systems, after the scheduler determines that the client is willing to attend an appointment in a few weeks, the scheduler visually examines schedule information to identify a day that has multiple unscheduled time slots, suggests one or more of the identified time slots to the client and then schedules an appointment when appropriate.
In the above example, if the client has an urgent condition or has a strong preference to schedule an appointment sooner than a few weeks from the date when the client calls to schedule the appointment, the scheduler may schedule the appointment on the day on which the client attempts to make the appointment or on some day shortly thereafter. Thus, both emergency appointments and demanding clients can be accommodated by simply maintaining some schedule time slots open until there is some appropriate reason to fill them.
While scheduling procedures that purposefully maintain open slots have advantages, such procedures have several shortcomings. First, if schedule time slots that are purposefully maintained open are not filled, physician time is not most efficiently used. Thus, for instance, assume that a middle appointment time and a last appointment time during each of a physician's morning and afternoon schedules are maintained open unless necessarily filled to accommodate an emergency or a demanding client. Here, if the middle and last appointment times are not filled, the physician's time is wasted as the physician waits for the next scheduled appointment.
Second, while the scheduler may know the scheduling rules well, applying those rules efficiently can pose a challenge. For instance, where facility scheduling rules call for maintaining four appointment times open during each physician's day, in known systems, the scheduler has to manually examine daily schedules to determine if more than four schedule time slots are open on each day that the scheduler considers for scheduling an appointment. This process is tedious, can be time consuming and mistakes can be made.
Third, while it may be possible for schedulers to abide by simple scheduling procedures (e.g., maintaining at least four open time slots each day), conforming to more complex procedures would be difficult if not impossible in many cases. For instance, scheduling optimization may ideally require application of ten different yet related scheduling rules which would be extremely difficult for a scheduler to manually apply.
Thus, it would be advantageous to have a system that automatically applies scheduling preference or optimization rules to schedules to identify optimal scheduling time slots for appointments and that provides visual queues to a scheduler regarding scheduling preferences and optimal time slots thereby facilitating optimized scheduling procedures.